Jane by Ronald Moran

It is your time of diminishments:
loss of hair, the spine and pelvis
gone soft and cracking. White
blood cells savage and deplete

you like schoolyard bullies, like
cannibals of blood. Last night
while I was stroking your head,
you woke up just long enough

to say you heard your mother
calling out your name, twice.



“Jane” is reprinted from Saying These Things (Clemson University Press, 2004).



Ronald Moran lives in Simpsonville, South Carolina. His poems have been published in Commonweal, Connecticut Poetry Review, Louisiana Review, Maryland Poetry Review, Negative Capability, North American Review, Northwest Review, South Carolina Review, Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, The Wallace Stevens Journal, and in thirteen books/chapbooks of poetry. Clemson University Press published his latest book Eye of the World in 2016. He has won a number of awards and his work is archived in Special Collections at Furman University.